1. Technical Field
This application relates to the field of computer systems, and more particularly to the field of managing data relating to deployment of computer systems.
2. Description of Related Art
As the complexity of IT systems increases, resources needed for the management of those systems, such as personnel, equipment, etc. also increase. In addition to technical complexity and number of components, many organizations are providing additional demands on IT services to provide certain levels of data quality, dependability, cost effectiveness, return on investment, throughput, response time, etc. Furthermore, many large organizations may have more than one IT department with partially overlapping and possibly ill-defined areas of responsibility and interface constraints between the IT departments. The management challenge becomes even more acute when factoring in the difficulties associated with security, adding new components, and modifying existing components to meet user needs. These challenges are compounded with regulatory compliance, such as Payment Card Industry (PCI) regulations. Frequently, compliance with statutes requires certain constraints on the configuration of the underlying information system.
In some instances, a configuration management database (CMDB) may be used to provide a central repository of IT configuration information and history for each configuration item (CI) that is part of the IT system. The CMDB may contain descriptions of each CI in terms of its technical attributes, its ownership, its history, and its relationship to other CIs and may implement a structured data model to manage the various categories of CIs, such as business processes, business services, applications, infrastructure components, etc. Thus the CMDB may manage all the data related to CIs in an IT system to support IT operations relating to incidents, problems, changes, service levels, etc. This category of functions supported by a CMDB is commonly known as IT Service Management (ITSM) and is associated with the IT Information Library (ITIL) family of best practices.
However, a difficulty with CMDBs is that the approach is very inflexible with respect to adding new types of CIs or modifying existing CIs. In some cases, a CMDB may not be able to provide any useful information or otherwise account for a new type of CI until the CMDB's data model or other metadata has been modified, which may be some time after the new CI has been added. In addition, CMDBs may not provide the correct result in the case of run time situations that the CMDBs have not been specifically programmed to handle. More specifically, if the values of the properties of a CI changes over time, as more information about the CI is discovered, inflexible, schema-based CMDB implementations may not be able to properly incorporate this additional information about the CI. Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a CMDB system having greater flexibility and adaptability than conventional approaches to designing a CMDB.